July 9, 2019

After violating a
court suppression order and publishing a murder suspect’s name, Google has
suspended its Trends alert emails in New Zealand.

In New Zealand,
among other countries, the right to a fair trial includes a court’s being able
to order people and organizations to refrain from publishing suspects’ names.

Google didn’t do
that. It says it didn’t even mean to, but its Google Trends alerts went ahead
and emailed out links to a media report that included the murder suspect’s
name.

A few days after
the December 2018 murder of British backpacker Grace
Millane, Google had sent an email to anyone signed up for its “what’s
trending in New Zealand” alert. After Google’s news-gathering algorithm picked
up a British newspaper’s report of the suspect’s court appearance, it
automatically forwarded the story to all subscribers, including the name of the
accused killer in the subject line.

That action
violated a suppression order prohibiting publication of the suspect’s name or
identification details. Google’s violation sparked outrage in New Zealand,
which, with its low serious-crime rate, had been shocked by the murder of the
young tourist, believed to have been killed the night before her 22nd birthday.

According to a furious
letter published by NZ Minister of Justice Andrew Little last week, when he
met with Google representatives six months ago, Google said that the company
took the issue seriously and that they’d look into what they could do to fix
the problem.

Mozilla has
introduced a lot of tracker blocking protections into Firefox lately. Now, it
is planning a new feature that will let you see how many online snoopers you’ve
successfully evaded.

A new feature
called the Tracking
Protections Panel (aka the Protection
Report) will tell users how many trackers Firefox blocked in the prior
week, giving them a good sense of how well these protections are working.

To help
understand why Mozilla is doing this, it’s worth looking at the tracker
protections Firefox has recently added.

Mozilla released
the full version of its Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP) system in Firefox
67.0.1 in June. This introduced default blocking for cross-site trackers, which
are the small pieces of code embedded in websites by advertising networks. They
watch what you’re reading across the web to generate a profile of you.

Mozilla
simultaneously released an updated version of its Facebook Container to stop
the social media giant tracking people in a similar way. Those share and like
buttons you see on various sites? They tell Facebook what you’re reading across
the web – whether you click them or not. The updated container blocks those, along
with all other connections to Facebook’s servers.

In May 2019,
Firefox also introduced
a feature to block any cryptomining scripts that the user runs across. These
are JavaScript programs that use the browser’s host computer to mine for
cryptocurrency (typically Monero). One or two are
legit and ask the user’s permission. Most aren’t, and don’t.

It doesn’t gather
and share your data, Apple promises, be it from taking a photo; asking Siri a
question; getting directions; what your heart rate is after a run; what news
stories you read; where you bought your last coffee; what websites you visit;
or who you call, email, or message.

You can do it
knowing that Apple doesn’t gather your personal information to sell to
advertisers or other organizations.

Apple products
are designed to protect your privacy – every Apple product is designed from the
ground up to protect that information. And to empower you to choose what you
share and with whom.

Quayside:
prime site for privacy virtue signaling

But that
billboard was then, and this is now: Apple has a new billboard and a far more
specific target. This time, the company has erected a privacy billboard at the
site of a developing “smart city” called Quayside. Some are calling the
neighborhood, on Toronto’s eastern waterfront, a privacy dystopia in the
making. It’s going to be sensor-thick, and it’s tangled up with the uber
data-collecting Google: the developer is Sidewalk Labs, which is a subsidiary
of Google’s parent company, Alphabet.

ACS

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